The area has been known as Abbey Point for centuries, and the ground stretching about 500 metres south-west of it was still being called the Abbey Field well into the twentieth century. The structures themselves are modest: a larger building, its internal dimensions at least ten metres east to west and 7.3 metres north to south, survives as a stone footing with its eastern end missing; just four metres to the south-west, a smaller building measuring roughly six metres by 3.4 metres can be made out as wall footings, its western end gone. Neither announces itself. They sit quietly in the level ground near a promontory fort, requiring a patient eye to read.

The island's documentary history stretches back to around 1177, when Hervey de Montmorency granted the Saltees to Christchurch, Canterbury. Canterbury in turn passed them to Tintern Abbey in 1245, and the two islands are mentioned by name in charters of that date. The monks almost certainly maintained some working presence here, probably an out-farm run by lay brothers rather than a formal church establishment, and the ruins near Abbey Point are thought to represent that occupation. Whether the island had earlier significance is suggested by the discovery of an ogham stone, ogham being an early medieval Irish script carved in notches along the edges of standing stones, which hints at a pre-Norman ecclesiastical connection. By the Suppression in 1541, the abbey still held the island in two portions of 120 and 60 acres. Ownership then passed through a succession of Wexford families: John Isham of Bryanstown leased the islands from 1548 to 1556, Anthony Colclough of Tintern took them in 1566, and the Grogan family of Johnstown Castle acquired them shortly afterwards. From 1770 the Boxwell family of Sarshill held the lease, and their tenants, the Furlongs of Kilmore Quay, were the last people to actually live here, abandoning the island before 1910. At the peak of settlement in the nineteenth century, Great Saltee supported a household of around twenty people.

The island is privately owned but welcomes day visitors, who typically arrive by boat from Kilmore Quay, roughly three and a half to six kilometres away on the south Wexford coast. The abbey structures lie near the north-eastern point, close to a promontory fort, on ground that is relatively level but covered in grass and fern. The footings are not immediately obvious from a distance; the geometry of the walls becomes clearer when approached slowly and viewed from close range.